Brown Grief: The largest of the three tyrannosaurid species native to Miri/Magus IV/Akara’s World. Mostly a scavenger because of their hulking size and slow movement, ugly is the word most often used to describe their appearance.

Armor Class: 4

Hit Dice: 20

Move: 60′ (20′)

Attacks: 1 bite

Damage: 6d6

No. Appearing: 1d2

Save As: Fighter: 10

Morale: 8

Treasure Type: Nil

Alignment: Neutral

Red Grief: A pack predator, red griefs are one of the three tyrannosaurid species on Miri/Magus IV/Akara’s World. Standing at the shoulder twice the height of a man, they look like a cross between a tyrannosaurus and a raptor and are only half the size of a brown grief. With a large, rounded blunt horn on the tip of their snout, the heads of red griefs are longer than a brown grief, and they have spinal armor plates all along their backs, tipped with long red needles that from a distance look like a crest of blood red feathers. They employ a pack strategy of noisy interaction amongst themselves, which is intended to make the herds they prey on accustomed to their presence and lower their guard.

Armor Class: 3

Hit Dice: 10

Move: 150’ (50’)

Attacks: 1 bite

Damage: 3-18

No. Appearing: 1-7 (2d4-1)

Save As: Fighter: 7

Morale: 9

Treasure Type: Nil

Alignment: Neutral

Red Grief packs of 4 or more will have a “leader”, usually a female. These “queens” are 10HD + 4. When present, the Red Griefs will have Morale 10. If the queen is eliminated, the rest of the pack will have Morale 8.

Dire Grief, by Armando Gil from Wild Stars II: Force Majeure

Dire Griefs: These are the smallest of the three types of tyrannosaurid griefs native to Miri/Magus IV/Akara’s World, but by far the most dangerous. Usually solitary, ambush predators, they are unique from the other griefs because of their telepathic skills that are responsible for their other name, Vampire Dragons. They also have the ability of optical camouflage and can hide in plain sight if they wish. After they gained possession of a Marzanti trident, dire griefs also became known as Dragon Kings.

Armor Class: 3

Hit Dice: 7***

Move: 150’ (50’)

Attacks: 1 bite

Damage: 3-18

No. Appearing: 1

Save As: Fighter: 7

Morale: 8

Treasure Type: Special*

Alignment: Neutral

Special Abilities: May use Clairvoyance, ESP, Invisibility as at-will abilities.

Dire Griefs surprise on a roll of 1-5 on 1d6.

*:Sometimes Dire Griefs may come into possession of magic items, particularly staffs. If a Dire Grief is in a populated or trafficked area [lair is not all-wilderness adjacent or roads pass through hex], there is 25% chance of the Dire Grief having 1d4 magical items in their lair [at least one will be a staff-type item]. There is an additional 10% chance that the Dire Grief will have the staff in its possession. Dire Griefs are intelligent and able to use magic items with an 80% chance of success.

[These stat entries are unofficial and not directly affiliated with Troll Lord Games, their upcoming Amazing Adventures 5e system, or their upcoming Wild Stars RPG setting supplement for said system.]

Dear @matthewmercer , From one dm to another, how can you stop/prevent your players from always becoming murder-hobos and killing their way through your campaign? Sincerely yours, a desperate dm that has tried for 4 years.

Well, I may not be Matthew Mercer, and I may not play a DM on a Youtube show, but as someone who has DMed and been a part of groups that have cured players of their murderhoboing, I may be somewhat qualified to answer.

My recommendation is simple:

Play B/X

Do not use negative hitpoints

Let Characters die because Players make bad choices

The first point really is mostly a preference choice that facilitates the third point. But if you let the choices that players make have serious consequences, even power players will shift their play-style towards more creative solutions than “kill everything”.

Your players party WILL go through a “kill everything with fire” phase of abject terror, where they realize that the horrors out there will kill them, but they haven’t quite figured out how to deal with it. Parties will learn quickly, however, that stone structures do not burn well…

Murder-hoboing is a behavior that CAN be trained away. Social contracts and pleading for your players to behave differently is ineffective because behavior is often facilitated by the game itself (not just the system, but “game”, meaning the sum of the system, the players, the DM, the adventure, etc.). B/X is an excellent training ground for changing this behavior because it shifts the equation in favor of that change. Characters are not overpowered and mistakes/bad decision making can be lethal. No, don’t kill characters to kill them, but allowing characters to suffer the consequences of their choices can put a kibosh on murderhoboing pretty quickly.

This approach is a great remedy for “always chaotic evil” guy, who will start coming up with characters who contribute positively and meaningfully to the group. And it helps murderhoboing parties because that situation usually comes from the whole group rather than a single player. It’s a mind-set that consequences can break.

“Oh, my asshole character died because I made bad choices” is going to bring about real change in a way that sitting everyone down and saying “Can you please not play an asshole this time?” simply will not.

As an addendum, I will say that I absolutely HATE people who say things like “Just tell everyone that you won’t tolerate a murder-hobo campaign! I mean, we’re all mature adults, right?!”

It treats people’s gaming groups as disposable and interchangeable. Sure, kick out intolerable players whose behavior can’t be changed, many people have a limited supply of friends with whom they can play D&D. And the behavior CAN be changed by teaching. Such an approach is needlessly reductive and an unhelpful suggestion, because even though players CAN be taught to play better, this is saying “it’s not worth it teach your players a new way of playing; get new friends.”

You don’t need new friends. You don’t necessarily need a new game–after you’ve done your road-work on B/X, you can switch back to other systems, the skills your players picked up will carry over. What you DO need to do is understand that behaviors at the table can change and are shaped by consequences–reward and punishment, carrot and stick.

Piles of bones. After 1 turn, whirlwind of bones, attacks as 6HD, 1d6. Protection from evil or turning both have effect.***

500 -1 swords, 1 +1 sword*

300 -1 short bows, 1 +1 bow*

* The -1 weapons aren’t cursed, just poor quality.

** The skeletons are the unnamed Least Lich’s “seed army”. He’s a lieutenant of Endymion the Ultralich, and if left alone after the seal has broken, he’ll eventually lead this army down into the valley and use his magic sword to amplify the curse and raise additional undead. Things dying on this dungeon level and returning as undead is part of the curse that the chapel/abbey was built to contain and not directly tied to the Least Lich himself.

***I handled this a bit differently in play. I came up with almost all dressings and secrets on the fly, so I had the handle to the secret door be a large key-crank hidden by one of the piles of bone. Also, after the initial whirlwind, touching the bones would activate the whirlwind again, and I had players roll dex to not touch bones.

My players finally wrapped on the B/X Deathcrypt game I was running. We ended up with only 3 players on Friday, but since we needed to bring the game to a close for various reasons, I let them brute force the ending a bit with some extra hirelings.

The Deathcrypt was always meant to be run as a mini-campaign, just something to be run for a few weeks to a few months until our regular DM moves out of town at the end of the summer and the group most likely breaks up for good. Still, it ended up much higher casualty rate than any other games I’ve run.

I think one of the major reasons why PC death was so high in this game was the drop-in nature, as many of our players have had things going on during the summer and weren’t able to make every session. A few really bad plays combined with a few players taking their character sheets with them ended up sucking a lot of XP and treasure out of the adventure. While I wasn’t running a Monty Hall dungeon by any stretch, the players should’ve gotten plenty of XP and been well equipped. Except the following stuff happened:

One character managed to be the sole survivor of a particularly brutal session and walked away with an entire wing of the dungeon’s XP all for himself. And then he died in the next session because he didn’t wait for his 7K XP to get banked and converted to levels.

The player who took the +1/+3 vs undead sword only showed up for 2 of the 5 or 6 sessions this game ran for.

The player who had the magic user who could read magic and had a ton of scrolls and a +1 ring of protection DID make it back for the final session, but he’d taken his character with him and subsequently lost the binder in the intervening weeks.

The players with fighters who’d gotten the top-notch gear (a set of +1 plate and a +3 spear) last session were absent from this.

A few fragile, high value objects were smashed instead looted.

We ended up with more lost characters and equipment than just about any game we’ve run. Partly, I think, because we did not strictly enforce the “leave your character sheet at X’s house” policy that we normally employed. Also, the lady who generally quarter-masters for the group has been busy over the summer and only made 2 or 3 sessions of this game, so party loot was much more prone to getting lost.

There were three ways party could reach the final dungeon boss. A counter-clockwise spiral that took them past some pretty gnarly stuff and straight to the throne room, a secret shortcut through the well that would bypass some of the gnarliest stuff, and a clockwise spiral that put them at the back-door of the boss’s chamber.

They’d actually reached the back door in the previous session but decided to call it for the night there and go back to town instead of finishing the dungeon. Armed to the teeth and with almost all of the players there, it probably would’ve been a cakewalk.

Instead, two characters enter the chamber with the necromancer, while the other characters hung back on the far side of a room with a swirling bone trap for a couple rounds before following. The player had his characters in the room try to stall for time, feigning obeisance and bowing—it proved something of a mistake to genuflect while asking how they might serve an undead necromancer; one of them got a sword through the back and the other ran after a round or two of ineffective combat.

The characters who’d hung back initially ran back the way they’d came while the fighter ran the other way, hoping that at least some of the party would get away. The fighter did get to see some interesting stuff on his way out:

Ran through the room with some skeleton guards and a Thoul

Ran through a room with gem encrusted living statues that got a swipe at him

Hit a dead end with ghouls hanging out on a very nice funerary barge

Smashed a glowing orb of ESP that a bunch of zombies were connected to

Between having plenty of armor, undead being fairly slow, and finding the well-path, he actually managed to make it to the well and climb out to meet his friends who’d gone back the other way. Fortunately, he did not choose the path that would’ve had him running down the corridors of shrieking and grasping bones.

The party came back to the dungeon armed to the teeth with holy water, and though the necromancer had martialed some of his nearby forces to make a stand, only the Thoul was able to do any real damage to the party. The tanks tanked successfully (AC 2 and 1 are VERY hard for 1HD monsters to hit—something to think about), the necromancer got blinded with a light spell, and got a ton of holy water dumped on him.

Holy water may be kind of OP if you used it the way I allowed. I figure that throwing the vial of holy water across the room at a monster and hoping it hits is dumb, so I kind of assumed that what you do is unstop the vial and shake it on the monsters like they do in the exorcist movies. Yeah, you have to be in melee range with the undead, but it’s not hard to get something wet when you’re trying to shake water on it from 5 feet away. So, my least-lich went down like the wicked witch of the west with a bucket of water thrown on her.

Anyway, the players averted the regional crisis. The least-lich was part of one of many cells left by Endymion the Ultralich to make preparations for his eventual return. With a small undead army at his disposal, this minor lieutenant could’ve flooded the valley with undead and started a blight upon the land. Think of it like an ambitious air-drop operation—each cell has various objectives it needs to achieve, possibly covering for other, less successful cells, for the operation to succeed. This information is lined out in one of the items in the least-lich’s possession; had this been planned as an ongoing campaign, rather than a summer time killer, that would’ve been the springboard into a region adventure with wildernesses, lost towers, the hunts for ruins and powerful macguffins, etc.

Fun was had. Highest level character at the end was a level 3 Thief. If we’d tallied XP for the final session, the thief would’ve been level 4, at least one fighter would’ve been 2. [Other fighters who weren’t there last night but had been the previous session could’ve hit level 2 easily if they had been there].

Later this week, I’ll post the final level of the dungeon as it was run.

At Free RPG Day, I got to game with a buddy who runs the local RPG con–B/X is his jam, and I love him for it.

He runs his somewhat uniquely, and there are aspects I disagree with (using a d8 base for semi-non-variable damage rather than d6), but there are others which I’ve stolen to make my own game run smoother (rotating initiative by side).

But the most important way he runs his game is that it’s fair–he’s not going to kick you when you’re down, but when you’ve goofed you’re done. PC death can and will happen in his games.

He’d run off some fairly wacky pre-gens from a site that gave stats and equipment that were all over the place. I ran a thief with 17 STR, 18 Dex, 8 Int, 18 WIS 14 CON, and CHA 4. Crusty Jim! I’ve learned from my own players and realized that Thieves have the potential to be the most stupid overpowered class, especially at lower levels. I cut my way through several orcs, bugbears, and giant spiders with my trusty Zweihander. With an AC of 4 and the potential to do over 20 damage in a single hit, I was a force to be reckoned with!

It’s also nice to play Borderlands without the moral quandaries that modernist gaming culture has tried to impose on it. We were told up-front: there are no orc babies; greenskins are creatures of evil that are born from, created by, and composed of evil and chaos taken shape. The goal was to kill them, rescue humans, recover treasure, and work to make the Borderlands just a little bit safer.

It wasn’t run straight from the module, but rather thematic, adjusted for a one-off. The keep was there, but we were given the choice to look for caves, small ruins, or large ruins (all home-made content). So I’ve still never played Borderland proper, but it was still a lot of fun cleaving through gobbos.

This second level is the lower, original abbey that was buried under a layer of dirt and ash. The hole in the chapel of the newer, upper church leads to room 10. The stairs north of 1 lead to the Library. Well in 22 is the back door to the Artificer’s workshop. Capstone in 26 leads to the Crypts (Level 3). Stairs in 27 are the main entrance to the Artificer’s workshop.

Space between 16, 19, 22, and all between 17 and 20 used to be an herb garden for soap-making; it can theoretically be cleared enough to create a “short cut”, but it would hardly be worth the effort. Exterior doors open to solid walls of dirt, stone, and ash. These can be excavated, but will take much longer than the upper tunnels.